


Secrets

by olivemartini



Category: Stitchers (TV)
Genre: Birthday, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Romance, Secrets, camsten
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 02:08:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4461218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olivemartini/pseuds/olivemartini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kirsten was a girl who had always had a lot of secrets.<br/>It had never bothered her before.  Before, she had found herself on her own more times than she could count, and the safest thing she could do was keep her secrets clutched tight to her heart.  They were to hard to explain, too dangerous and shameful and scary to ever share with someone else, not that she would ever want to.  She dwelled in her lies, and was content to do so, happy with the fabricated life she tried to build around her.<br/>But the secrets kept piling up, and she was no longer happy to keep them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Secrets

Kirsten was a girl who had always had a lot of secrets.

It had never bothered her before.  Before, she had found herself on her own more times than she could count, and the safest thing she could do was keep her secrets clutched tight to her heart.  They were to hard to explain, too dangerous and shameful and scary to ever share with someone else, not that she would ever want to.  She dwelled in her lies, and was content to do so, happy with the fabricated life she tried to build around her.

But the secrets kept piling up, and she was no longer happy to keep them. 

They weighed her down, heavy in her chest.  They filled her lungs, suffocating her, so that when she tried to talk she found she didn't even have the air to breathe.  She was being crushed under the guilt and the pressure and the sheer feeling of being _alone_ in this.  It was made even worse by Cameron and Camille and Linus, three people that were very used to their normal, safe (if not exactly happy) lives, who had no problem with sharing their troubles with each other and expecting her to do the same.

By all accounts, she should have been willing to tell them everything.  They didn't have the added weight of Ed, or being in those memories, or temporal dysplasia, or have to feel their way through emotions for the first time, but her friends did understand certain things.  They got what it was like to go home and have your thoughts haunted by the ghost of a deceased woman or man that you'd never met before but still grieved over.  They knew what it was like to lie to your loved ones, to dodge questions that should have been easy to answer, to have everyone's idea of you be nothing but fabrications.  Cameron and Camille shared the bond of a shattered and unhappy child hood, and all three understood the concept of being an outcast.  They also knew the stress and dangers that came with going to work in a secret lab every day and solving murders for a secret government agency that may or may not be trying to kill them. 

That didn't mean they knew all of her secrets.  That didn't mean they knew she had a list in her head, a list of things that people could never ever know about her.  Stitching, temporal dysplasia, the key that Ed left her, her recent suspicions, the way she had realized since the Spanish flu incident that Maggie was no safer than the rest of them. No one knew the more personal things, the painful memories from childhood, the way the feeling of being alone was with her even as she walked into a crowded room, how back when she would go to church she would pray for nothing other than to know what happy felt like, how for a year after her father left her she would wait at the door whenever it got close to his usual time for coming home from work.  She couldn't tell them the more shameful things, like how she never went to her mothers grave more than twice, how at first she truly did think Cameron, Linus, and Camille were dangerous and people to be avoided, how she didn't love Liam at all and at first was just using him to prove something to herself.  She couldn't tell them the most pitiful thing of all, that the only reason she had let Liam stay in her life in the first place had everything to do with the fact that being with Liam was the closest thing she had known to happiness, before she had met Cameron.

But now there was one more secret, one more lie.

"Make a wish!"  They were all looking at her, these people who somehow found it in themselves to care about her. 

"I don't make wishes."  She said it in her usual way, but a small part of her wanted to start crying, and Kirsten was tempted to go around and hug each and every one of them. 

The not making wishes thing was a lie.  The truth?

She was scared they would ask what she had wished for.  But here it is:

She wished that they had met under different circumstances.  She wished she was normal, and she had been able to return the hug Camille greeted her with the first day they met instead of pushing her away.  She wished that she had gone on to work at some prestigious company for computer technology, and that Cameron would have been there, too, and she would be introduced to him over coffee at the break room.  She wished that Linus would have been there, too, and Kirsten could have brought him home to Camille and watched their relationship grow without the threat of death and government agencies looming over their shoulders. 

She wished Liam had never come back, and he had never proposed.  She wished that Cameron had taken his place instead, pulling her to him and kissing her hard after one of their many movie nights and coffee dates and routine, boring, normal, totally non-dangerous work days, and the two of them had gotten their happily ever after. 

Kirsten wasn't sure how long she had been hoping for this.

She wished for it to come true.  But that was a lot of responsibility for one little candle.

So she just walked away.

 

**Author's Note:**

> How'd I do?   
> Comments and kudos are appreciated!


End file.
